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⁹ The government formed after the 1994 Italian general election included the National Alliance Party, successor to the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). This inclusion of the National Alliance in the ruling coalition elicited considerable criticism from other European governments (‘Mussolini is dead – for the moment’, The Economist, 11 06 1994, p. 46).Google Scholar

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¹² Schain, Martin A., ‘The National Front in France and the Construction of Political Legitimacy’. West European Politics, 10 (1987), 229–52, at p. 242. In 1976.CrossRefGoogle Scholar the Gaullist bloc became the Rassemblement pour la république (RPR), while the Union pour la démocratic français (UDF) emerged in 1978 from a federation of centrist and conservative groups.

¹³ Bréchon, Pierre and Mitra, Subrata K., ‘The National Front in France: The Emergence of an Extreme Right Protest Movement’, Comparative Politics, 25 (1993), 63–82, at p. 80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ The country studies include Betz, Hans-Georg, ‘Politics of Resentment: Right-Wing Radicalism in West Germany’, Comparative Politics, 23 (1990), 45–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mayer, Nonna and Perrineau, Pascal, ‘Why Do They Vote for LePen?’ European Journal of Political Research, 22 (1992), 123–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Minkenberg, Michael, ‘The New Right in Germany’, European Journal of Political Research, 22 (1992), 55–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitra, Subrata, ‘The National Front in France: A Single-Issue Movement?’ in von Beyme, Klaus, ed., Right-Wing Extremism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 1988), pp. 47–64Google Scholar; Schain, Martin A., ‘Immigration and Changes in the French Party System’, European Journal of Political Research, 16 (1988), 597–621CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Voerman, Gerrit and Lucardie, Paul, ‘The Extreme Right in the Netherlands’, European Journal of Political Research, 22 (1992), 35–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Westle, Bettina and Niedermayer, Oskar, ‘Contemporary Right-Wing Extremism in West Germany’, European Journal of Political Research, 22 (1992), 83–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For more general studies, see, e.g., Betz, , “The New Politics of Resentment: Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe’, Comparative Politics, 25 (1993), 413–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Falter, Jürgen W. and Schumann, Siegfried, ‘Affinity Towards Right-Wing Extremism in Western Europe’, in von Beyme, Klaus, ed., Right-Wing Extremism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 1988), pp. 96–110Google Scholar; Husbands, Christopher T., ‘Contemporary Right-Wing Extremism in Western European Democracies: A Review Article’. European Journal of Political Research, 9 (1981), 75–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ignazi, , ‘The Silent Counter-Revolution’Google Scholar; and von Beyme, Klaus, ‘Right-Wing Extremism in Post-War Europe’, in von Beyme, Klaus, ed., Right-Wing Extremism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass. 1988), pp. 1–18.Google Scholar

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²¹ More generally, this is a key distinction between institutional explanations and those that are cast in terms of political culture, a societal, grass-roots concept. See Jackman, Robert W. and Miller, Ross A., ‘A Renaissance of Political Culture?’ American Journal of Political Science, 40 (1996), in press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (New York: Wiley, 1963).Google Scholar

²³ Lijphart, Arend, Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Rae, Douglas W., The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws, revised edn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Riker, William H., ‘The Two-Party System and Duverger's Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science’, American Political Science Review, 76 (1982), 753–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duverger, Maurice, ‘Duverger's Law: Forty Years Later’, in Grofman, Bernard and Lijphart, Arend, eds, Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences (New York: Agathon, 1986), pp. 69–84Google Scholar; and Sartori, Giovanni, ‘The Influence of Electoral Systems: Faulty Laws or Faulty Method?’Google Scholar in Grofman, and Lijphart, , eds, Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences, pp. 43–68.Google Scholar

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²⁹ Betz, , ‘The New Politics of Resentment’, p. 416.Google Scholar

³⁰ The most thorough treatment of these issues is offered by Layard, Richard, Nickell, Stephen and Jackman, Richard, Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, who compare unemployment trends across the EC, EFTA, the United States and Japan on p. 2 (EFTA includes Austria, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland). Age and gender differences in unemployment are reported on p. 7, and differences by occupational standing are shown on pp. 288–90 (in most cases, the ratio of manual to non-manual unemployment rates is approximately 2:1).

³¹ Indeed, it has been described as ‘Europe's most pressing domestic problem’ (‘Getting Europe back to work’, The Economist, 28 08, 1993, pp. 43–4.Google Scholar See also ‘Jobless Europe’, The Economist, 26 06, 1993, p. 17).Google Scholar

³² See, e.g., Mitra, , ‘The National Front in France’Google Scholar; Westle, and Niedermayer, , ‘Contemporary Right-Wing Extremism in West Germany’Google Scholar; and Lewis-Beck, and Mitchell, , ‘French Electoral Theory’.Google Scholar

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³⁴ A parallel argument is made by Lewis-Beck and Mitchell (‘French Electoral Theory’) in their analysis of support for the French National Front. Comparing aggregate data across departments, they find that support for the Front National (FN) is a function of unemployment and immigration levels, along with crime rates.

³⁵ Castles, and Mair, , ‘Left-Right Political Scales’.Google Scholar These authors report that respondents were able to assign numerical values to their country's parties according to instructions even though this procedure does not take into account the possible multi-dimensional meaning of the left-right language. For a summary and evaluation of various methods of constructing policy scales, see Laver, and Schofield, , Multiparty GovernmentGoogle Scholar, Appendix B, and for evidence of the salience of left-right orientations to voters, see Huber, John D., ‘Values and Partisanship in Left-Right Orientations: Measuring Ideology’, European Journal of Political Research, 17 (1989), 599–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁶ Ignazi, , ‘The Silent Counter-Revolution’, p. 12.Google Scholar

³⁷ Ignazi, , ‘The Silent Counter-Revolution’Google Scholar; and Taggart, Paul, ‘New Populist Parties in Western Europe’, West European Politics, 18 (1995), 34–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar It is thus not surprising that, following its participation in the Berlusconi government in 1994, the Italian Social Movement was officially replaced by the National Alliance in 1995 in a formal effort to sever the link between the extreme right and the Mussolini legacy (‘Fini snuffs out fascist flame to try to boost party’, Financial Times, 26 01 1995, p. 2).Google Scholar

³⁸ In addition to Taggart, , ‘New Populist Parties in Western Europe’Google Scholar, these supplementary sources involve country studies that appeared in a special issue of Parliamentary Affairs 45 (07 1992)Google Scholar; Hainsworth, , ed., The Extreme Right in Europe and the USAGoogle Scholar; and Merkl, Peter and Weinberg, Leonard, eds, Encounters with the Contemporary Radical Right (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992).Google Scholar

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⁴² Economic Commission for Europe, Economic Survey of Europe in 1990–1991 (New York: United Nations. 1991)Google Scholar, Appendix table A. 12. The only case for which unemployment data are missing is Switzerland, 1971. We substituted the Swiss unemployment figure for 1975 for the missing 1971 value, but none of the results below hinge on this interpolation.

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⁴⁴ In addition to the raw unemployment rates we use, OECD reports a series of ‘standardized’ unemployment rates which are intended to control for small cross-country differences in the reporting of unemployment. Unfortunately, the spatial and temporal coverage of the standardized figures is limited. Since the standardization is intended to minimize cross-country differences in reporting, however, any such differences are also controlled with the country dummy variables that we employ. A more complete series based on the standardized figures that covers all of the countries we examine except for Greece and Portugal is provided by Layard, , Nickell, and Jackman, , Unemployment. pp. 526–9.Google Scholar A regression of our measure on the standardized version (N = 89) yields an estimated constant of 0.01 (standard error, 0.11), a slope of 1.01 (standard error. 0.01), and an R² of 0.98. Thus, it is not surprising that substituting the standardized figures for those we use below (and thereby excluding Greece and Portugal from the analysis) provides estimates very similar to those reported in ‘Tables 2 and 3 below. We therefore conclude that the standardization procedure involves quite minor adjustments.

⁴⁵ See. for example. Stimson, , ‘Regression in Space and Time’.Google Scholar

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⁴⁹ These procedures are discussed by Berk, Richard A., ‘A Primer on Robust Regression’, in Fox, John and Long, J. Scott, eds, Modern Methods of Data Analysis (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990), pp. 292–324Google Scholar, and Western, Bruce, ‘Concepts and Suggestions for Robust Regression Analysis’, American Journal of Political Science, 39 (1995), 786–817.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The robust estimator is a maximum-likelihood procedure that downweights observations according to the size of their estimated residuals and thereby allows an evaluation of whether a small minority of observations are exerting a disproportionate effect on the estimates. The median regression estimator (also known as least-absolute value regression) is an alternative maximum-likelihood procedure that fits by minimizing the sum of absolute (as opposed to squared) residuals, and is thus less sensitive to extreme values on the dependent variable. All calculations were made with the STATA statistical package.

⁵⁰ On this general issue, see, e.g., Friedrich, Robert J., ‘In Defense of Multiplicative Terms in Multiple Regression Equations’, American Journal of Political Science, 26 (1982), 797–833.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁵⁶ See, e.g., Shugart, Matthew S., ‘Electoral Reform in Systems of Proportional Representation’, European Journal of Political Research, 21 (1992), 207–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lijphart, , Electoral Systems and Party Systems, pp. 139–52.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ At first sight, the results from the 1994 general election in Italy might seem to contradict our argument, given the success of the National Alliance (successor to the MSI) following electoral reforms designed to restrict smaller parties. However, it is important to note that, because of the reforms, the National Alliance formed a pre-election coalition with the Northern League and Forza Italia which allowed them, among other things, to field joint candidates throughout Italy (on these developments, see ‘The rise of Italy's right’, The Economist, 19 02 1994, pp. 55–6Google Scholar). The reforms themselves are discussed in ‘Italy: Rules of the new game’, The Economist, 26 06 1993, pp. 56–8Google Scholar, and by Calise, Mauro, ‘Remaking the Italian Party System: How Lijphart Got It Wrong by Saying It Right’, West European Politics, 16 (1993), 545–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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